Will the REAL Queen City Please Stand Up?
I was born and raised in the greater Cincinnati area and always knew her as The Queen City: the place where pigs fly, and though I didn’t know the answer to the question, Why is Cincinnati known as the Queen City? She just was.
Imagine my surprise one day, when flying through Charlotte, NC, to find signs in the airport everywhere deeming that city as The Queen City! I must have forgotten about it, or dismissed it, because I was scrolling through Instagram a while back and, as a suggested post with #queencity, I found myself looking at the most delicious looking food! I quickly attempted to see what side of town this restaurant was on (not that it really mattered, since everything is about 18 minutes from Blue Ash), only to be disappointed to learn it was SEVEN hours away!
That is when I decided to dig in and get to the bottom of this nickname debacle to figure out how in the heck two cities, so close geographically, could share the same moniker!? As a native Cincinnatian, whose pride in her city runs deep, I’m not sure I was entirely happy with the results, but after you read the facts, reach out and tell me what YOU think.
Brief History of Cincinnati: Important Dates
1788: Settlement of Losantiville founded
1790: Name changed to Cincinnati.
1802: Cincinnati incorporated as a town.
1819: Cincinnati first referred to in print as “Queen of the West”
1820: Cincinnati incorporated as a city
1849: Establishment of the Cincinnati Reds, the oldest professional baseball team.
1853: Introduction of the first professional and fully paid fire departments in the US, powered by the first steam fire engines.
1854: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writes poem “Catawba Wine” referring to Cincinnati as “Queen of the West”
Who is Charlotte anyway?
To start my mission, I wanted to establish a timeline. Who was first? Where did the nicknames come from? and when is the first reference to the nickname in print? This is where things got sticky. At first glance, Charlotte, or “Charlottetown” was established in 1768 and named after Queen Charlotte, the wife of “Mad” King George III, in order to suck up to him. This was fairly damning evidence. If you look around the internet, most arguments point to Charlotte, NC being the real Queen City because it’s kind of baked into the name. Being someone who is sort of a purist, things were looking bleak.
Cincinnati was NOT named after a queen.
We were named after a Roman dictator who saved Rome, then decided he didn’t want power and retreated to a life of farming. We also had a ton of OTHER nicknames: the extremely classy “Porkopolis”, “The City of Seven Hills” (a nickname that also has Roman roots), and according to Wikipedia, “The Blue Chip City”, which I’ve never heard in my life. Charlotte’s whole identity seems to revolve around being the Queen City. They have Queen’s University, and Queen City is written in Latin on their city seal. We don’t have any of that here!
There are HOW many Queen City’s?
So then I decided to search for Queen City and that’s when things got really out of hand. Apparently, the term Queen City is a generic term for the second largest city in the state or the largest city that isn’t the capital. There are three cities in the US actually CALLED Queen City, in Iowa, Missouri and Texas. There are four cities in Canada referred to as the Queen City, and Auckland in New Zealand and FORTY cities in the United States that are referred to as the Queen City in one way or another.
Selma, Alabama - Queen City of the Blackbelt
Eureka, California - Queen City of the Ultimate West (obviously Ohio is no longer considered the West, as a lot has changed since 1819 in terms of geography in the United States)
Marquette AND Traverse City, Michigan - BOTH claim Queen City of the North
Greenville, Mississippi is Queen City of the Delta
Helena, Montana is Queen City of the Rockies
Del Rio, Texas refers to itself as Queen City of the Rio Grand.
Where does this leave us in this grudge match of WHO IS THE REAL QUEEN CITY?
Well, I may be a little biased, but the definitive evidence in the argument between Charlotte and Cincinnati came to me when reading an article posted on the Charlotte affiliate of NPR’s website. Throughout my research, everyone claimed that the nickname had always been there in Charlotte, but I couldn’t find ONE SINGLE reference in early print. Until now. According to this article from WFAE.org, the first reference in writing that we know about is in the Charlotte Observer in 1887!!!!! That is almost 70 years after the reference of Cincinnati as the Queen of the West in the Inquisitor and Cincinnati Advertiser (a precursor to the Cincinnati Enquirer) and 33 years after New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “Catawba Wine” about the beautiful vineyards in the Cincinnati valley. The final verse reads:
And this Song of the Vine,
This greeting of mine,
The winds and the birds shall deliver,
To the Queen of the West,
In her garlands dressed,
On the banks of the Beautiful River
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What do YOU think?
Fall where you will in this argument, but the answer is clear to me. Not only do we have time on our side, but our nickname was given to us due to our beauty and growth, symbolizing prosperity, not unlike a queen's reign, not because we were named to suck up to a king that pushed the Colonies to jump ship and who presided over the loss of the American Revolution.
Cincinnati's Real Estate Majesty
As the Queen City continues to evolve, its real estate market stands as a testament to growth and resilience. As one of Cincinnati's real estate companies, TREO Realtors is proud to play a pivotal role in shaping the housing market, offering a diverse range of services for those looking to build, buy or sell a home. The city's housing market, crowned one of the hottest in the nation for 2024, reflects a captivating tale of demand and innovation.
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